- Does foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing economies lead to investors shopping around for weak regulations and more pollution, or does it promote green growth? Tim Philips from VoxDev talks to Beata Javorcik, looking at the particular case of Indonesia.
- Terence Wood and Sherman Surandiran analyse the dynamics of donations in Australia.
- In 70% of countries, states have laws and regulations that may contribute to the gender pay gap. Katrin Schulz and Nour Chamseddine look at what can be done to improve the situation.
- Haichao Fan et. al look at the impact environmental regulations have had in China, nudging firms to trade off between production arrangements and toxic emissions.
- The United Nations is currently going through a period of self-renewal. While the Guterres reforms are focused on streamlining the operations of the secretariat, trimming the administrative beast might be more complicated than expected.
- In 2018, Cape Town, South Africa narrowly avoided becoming the world’s first major city to entirely run out of water. Perth, which faced the same issues a decade ago, decided to better engage with the community on the matter, making the city much more resilient to climate change and water scarcity.
- Sherillyn Raga et. al have a new ODI paper on evaluating the economic impact of the coronavirus around the world. They develop an interesting vulnerability index looking at various transmission channels such as health, economic links with China, global integration and resilience, concluding that the top countries at risk are Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and the Philippines, along with the sub-Saharan region of Africa.
- World Bank President David Malpass asked the staff of the Development Research Group what major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade. They came up with a very interesting working paper assembling a set of 13 short, non-technical briefing notes prepared in response to this request.
- Finally, the 2020 Australasian Aid Conference is happening next week. There are still spots available, so if you’re in Canberra from Monday 17 to Wednesday 19 February, don’t forget to register! Here are 10 reasons you should go.
Development links: Gender pay gap, UN reform, coronavirus impact, more
Links and stories from the aid and development sector.
Perth, Australia, a model of urban water conservation (Photo: Pedro Szekely/Flickr)
Published 12 Feb 2020
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